


Eclipsed

by CanuckofSpiral



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Original Statement, The Eye, solar eclipse, the vast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CanuckofSpiral/pseuds/CanuckofSpiral
Summary: Statement of Albert Fairchild regarding a solar eclipse he witnessed while in Alderney. Statement given August 30th, 2004.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19





	Eclipsed

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic on ao3, as well as my first completed fan-avatar fic. Hope you enjoy!

Do you know how big a million is? What about a hundred million? A billion? Two hundred billion?  
  
At a certain point, numbers stop being a quantifiable concept in the human mind. Sure, you can read the words on the page, describe the number as a factor of magnitude greater than something more digestible, but it’s not the same as being able to conceptualize ten or twenty things, is it?   
  
Our minds have limits to what we can imagine, barriers to the boundaries of the canvases of the mind. But what if you could go beyond those limits?   
  
I’m sorry, I know this is supposed to be my “statement.” You want me to spill my guts, relay my life story, how I went from a humble man of science to a semi-human freak. I get it, it comes with the territory of the Knower of All Things. Part of me wishes I had gotten more from the watcher, but perhaps I *was* the watcher, and the titan my watched.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

  
  
My name is Albert Fairchild. It wasn’t always Albert Fairchild, mind you, I was adopted-in after my ascension. 

I suppose that’s the story you want to hear, right? How did I become? Well, let me paint the scene.

As a child, I loved the stars. I grew up in a small village in the highlands, far away from the bustle of urban life.

Even when I was very, very young, I would lay upon the fields and rocks, trying to count all the stars in the night sky. I asked my father what the stars were, and he sat me down and told me the truth as he knew it.   
  
He told me of suns so far away that their light is but a pinprick, and that the light had taken so long to reach us, that those stars might be long gone and we won’t even know it until their explosive death reaches us, long after he and I were both forgotten. I believe if I were a religious man, I would call that my first sermon.

I threw myself into the learnings of space, the gaps between the beacons of light and life, and how we had never once found our equal amongst them, how we sat alone in the impossible dark, suspended on sunbeams. 

Every time I thought about that, just how little time we had been here and how little we were compared to the reality we live in, I felt this thrill. This little rush, like falling up into the sky. Carl Sagan once said, “It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” I hope I can live up to that.

  
  
I graduated with degrees in astronomy and astrophysics from Edinburgh, and shortly after I got word of a solar eclipse that was to reach totality above Alderney, in the south of the english channel. August 11, 1999. 10:00am. So off I went.

Alderney is a lovely place to spend a day. Not a large island, you could walk across it in a few hours if you move. Makes you feel small in the channel, even if France isn’t so far away. 

I won’t bore you with the details of my arrival in the wee hours of the morning, or my wanderings to find the perfect spot to observe from, but I will tell you about how this outing took a turn that led me to this very institute where I give you my story now.  
  
See, when I went through my bag of equipment, my solar shielding glasses had broken, right at the nose bridge. Now this wasn’t a total heartbreak, I had camera equipment still that was ready to capture the event, but I was rather disappointed to be robbed of a direct line of sight to the totality.

As I wandered the streets, seeking some spirits to ease my mild woe, I heard someone call to me.   
  
I turned to find a tall man waving me over to a park bench where he sat, hawaiian shirt partially unbuttoned and grinning at me. He was powerfully built, samoan complexion maybe, and I had an immediate sense that this man was dangerous. I came to know in the time since who this man was, and that my approaching him might have been a mistake, but at the time he just introduced himself as “A Friend.”

He asked me if I had broken anything today that needed replacing. Yes, I told him, my eclipse glasses. I pulled out my broken pair from my pocket and he flashed me another grin, saying he happened to have a pair for sale. They were simple black plastic with thick dark lenses, and after some hasty thanks and a few dozen pounds traded, which I still find overpriced despite myself, I was off.

The eclipse was getting near, and I had to be ready. The cool air against my face felt tinged with anticipation as I left the main town centre to a nearby grassy field where tens of thousands of prospective eclipse gazers like myself had come to witness such a rare event. I even smelled something illicit on the breeze, no doubt teenagers hoping to imbibe and listen to Pink Floyd or something. Can’t say I blame them for not wanting to miss the chance.

The moment was here. As I gazed up, I saw the pale disc of the sun begin to become a crescent, as if being eaten whole by the greatest monster imaginable. Total, utterly total darkness plummeted upon Alderney, and the crowd’s anticipation was palpable. The wonder, the amazement, the fear in their legion of voices, as if singing to the sky. It was like nothing I had ever heard. Then, at last, like a grand eye with its pupil dilated to proportions inhumane, its glorious outline of sunlight like an omen of the end itself, I stared into the eclipse.

  
  
_And the eclipse stared back._

The cornea, the ring of sunlight around the impossibly black hole in the sky, began to swell, and distort, and _grow._ The moon slowly, so slowly I almost didn’t notice it at first, began to stretch across more and more sky, first I could cover it with my thumb, but before long nothing in the world could have blotted out the moon.   
  
I looked around me in a panic, was anyone seeing this? But I was alone. Utterly alone. And with an acceptance I cannot place to this day, I returned my gaze to the moonfall. And fall, the moon did. The light around it, now the almost almondlike shape of an eye with an enormous, dilated pupil, drinking me in. The eye-that-was-the-moon-and-sun knew me, it knew my soul and **loved** it. I loved it with utter abandon, and as I did the approach increased, as if the Earth’s companion since time nearly forgotten had chosen to embrace me and me alone.   
  
And it was so big. Seeing it like that, stretching from horizon to horizon while minutes before the moon had not even been visible in the sky, it was my second sermon, and I had found my gods. I could see every last inch of the moon’s dust and craters, where none had ever stood, corners none knew of, and yet I knew how impossibly big and far apart the cosmos was, how when the moon erased us entirely we would not even be noticed.

  
  
_And I had never felt more **alive** in my entire life._

I awoke on the grass, the taste of dirt filling my mouth. A passerby was shaking me, asking I was alright, I had collapsed apparently. But that did not matter any longer. I could collapse again, and again, and plummet into the falling forever between the worlds, where humanity’s greatest speeds barely register, where light itself strains to explore before missing matter entirely, never to be seen, never to end.  
  
I saw the man again. I demanded to know what he had done to me, what I had seen, and where I could learn more. He just laughed, a full belly-laugh, and said that I had bought what I paid for, and that he hoped I had enjoyed the view, and to “keep an eye on the blue above.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself chasing the stars again, and again, and again. The scope of the universe is too much to hold, see, and you need to move fast to catch it at all. How can you understand it if you don’t experience it for yourself?  
  
So I was there. June 21, 2001, Kabwe, Zambia. Total eclipse. Not as perfect, but I saw the eye again. And I felt the vertigo. That December, Costa Rica. Annular Solar Eclipse. Not perfect darkness again, but the shadow of the eye was the bluest of blues I had ever seen. December 2002, South Australia. Purest knowledge seemed to be asking of me what I sought.   
  
I needed one more. Just one more, to devote myself, I needed a total eclipse far from the lights, far from people where I could truly become what I felt was upon me.   
  
And in the summer of 2003, I got my chance. An old man came to my door. A little pink skeleton of a man, with unkept hair and a baby-blue shirt, marked by bright red suspenders. He introduced himself as Simon Fairchild, and within five minutes of conversation, I had cleaned my slate for October, and found myself upon my last journey as who I was between who I was and who I am.   
  
To say that the total eclipse that bathed the antarctic sky that autumn was beautiful would be to say that the stars are but candles. I felt it when I was no longer who I was before. Standing upon the deck of a cargo ship, Mr.Fairchild at my side, I gazed, bare-eyed, into the Watcher of the Vast. I heard the song of the last sermon I needed to truly, **truly** Know. And I. Was. Whole.   
  
…   
  
I suppose that wraps up my tale. Simon adopted me into the family, took me on as part of some projects he has in the pipeline that he says would match my expertise. He’s also asked me to liaise with you from time to time, Archivist, given my dual proclivities. I don’t suspect we shall see much of one another, but if you ever wish to Know something about the falling titan’s infinite embrace, I know some _Fantastic_ places to see the stars. We’ll count them together.

**Statement Ends.**


End file.
